Information technology is changing rapidly and now forms an invisible layer that increasingly touches nearly every aspect of business and social life. An emerging computer model known as cloud computing addresses the explosive growth of Internet-connected devices, and complements the increasing presence of technology in today's world. Cloud computing is a model of service delivery for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, network bandwidth, servers, processing, memory, storage, applications, virtual machines, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or interaction with a provider of the service.
Cloud computing is massively scalable, provides superior user experience, and is characterized by new, Internet-driven economics. In one perspective, cloud computing involves storage and execution of business data inside a cloud which is a mesh of inter-connected data centers, computing units and storage systems spread across geographies.
Storage controllers typically manage storage disks or Managed Disks (MDisks) at a back end of a cloud. Storage controllers with similar operational characteristics are combined, and are further combined with MDisks with similar operational characteristics (e.g., rotations per minute (RPM), etc.) in a particular MDisk group. Such a group is used to create a Virtual Disk (VDisk), which is mapped or masked to a user application of a cloud computing device.